The past year has seen the arrival of one of the bigger developments to smartphone screens in recent years, with sapphire panels coming to affordable consumer-focused phones for the first time. Those may be headline-grabbing, but they're still quite rare, and for all the attention we've been giving sapphire, it's Corning and its Gorilla Glass 3 that have been the workhorse of the industry, protecting the displays of flagship handsets from manufacturer after manufacturer. Having launched all the way back in early 2013, though, even Gorilla Glass 3 is getting a little old; now it's time for ...

How do you preserve the scratch-free finish of the glass covering your smartphone's display? Well – besides just being really careful, that is. A bulky case? A plastic stick-on screen protector? The latter may be a very popular option, but doesn't that feel like a bit of a downgrade, moving from precision-engineered glass to plastic? Today the team at dbrand is launching a new line of mobile accessories that seek to offer unparalleled screen protection while also maintaining that high-quality look you only get from glass, introducing its line of dbrand glass Gorilla Glass screen ...

People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones - but what about people with glass smartphones? Pocketnow Power User is a series of videos and articles aimed at the "average Joe", explaining core concepts that might seem confusing, even daunting. On this episode of the Pocketnow Power User, we're going to talk about the glass that covers your smartphone, tablet, or wearable. Almost all of our smartphones, tablets, and wearables have a screen. Some are very small, like on your smartwatch or Google Glass, others are very large, like on your iPad or Surface. Still more are somewhere in ...

When you're talking about making smartphone displays that are durable enough to withstand the hell we put our phones through on a day-to-day basis, there's no name bigger than Corning. Its various iterations of Gorilla Glass over the years have protected many a smartphone, but lately the conversation’s been moving from what we can do to toughen-up glass, to what other glass-like materials might make superior screen coverings. Synthetic sapphire crystal has been dominating our imaginations, and rumors suggest that Apple could very well be ramping-up production in an effort to deliver the ...

Being that smartphones very rarely leave our sides, even the most ruggedized ones can incur a small amount of damage over time. Sometimes, that damage can be much, much worse. While contact with the elements – especially water – can be fatal to your handset, every smartphone still has an Achilles' heel: glass. Whether you paid $30 for a Lumia 520 on sale to upwards of $1,000 for your smartphone, no phone is entirely shatter-proof. I've seen Mil-Spec phones get shattered, as well as a Nexus 4 drop a few inches onto a tabletop to spider webbing on the back glass. That hasn't stopped some ...

Last Friday, I published the most recent iteration of our Durability Report series, where we take a phone we've carried for months on end and provide an update on how it's handled the abuse of the daily grind throughout our use. While the Moto X has proved rather resilient, even through some drops on hardwood and concrete, some damage is inevitable. Whether you drop your phone, toss it on tables, place it in the same pocket as something such as keys or change, or even if you handle it with the utmost care, tiny dings, nicks, and scratches will ultimately appear over time. Some of us avoid ...

There's no denying that Gorilla Glass has become one of the best-known industry standards for smartphones. Ever since their silent launch on the first iPhone, it's now a flagship spec requirement that you'll hear mentioned in almost every one of our reviews, and which keeps evolving like clockwork at every CES we go to. One thing you might have noticed is that the product hasn't made it to wearable technology just yet, and even though there are compelling technical reasons for that, it's something that's about to change. Corning has just announced a new product that they're dubbing 3D ...

Corning has been famous for giving us durable glass displays on smartphones since the original iPhone, which is even before they came-up with the name Gorilla Glass. Today, we're already enjoying the benefits of Gorilla Glass 3, and its popularity has ensured their technology is now on top of almost every single display we use every day, and its grown beyond the smartphone into tablets, and even the design elements of certain HP computers that were launched recently. Just as Samsung pretty-much bought Wacom a couple of years ago to ensure their dominance in the technology that powers the ...

We've been huge fans of future possible sapphire solutions for smartphones ever since MWC. We've also visited the factory that can make this possible. Sapphire is known to be an extremely tough material, almost impossible to scratch. It has its own downside though: it's also very brittle. Gorilla Glass, on the other hand, is less brittle, but, it is much easier to scratch. Gorilla Glass vs sapphire has recently become a real topic. Currently, the majority of phone makers are using Gorilla Glass, from Corning, in one of its version iterations -- adding up for 1.5 billion consumer electronic ...

Synthetic sapphire smartphone screens: besides being fun to say five times real fast, they sound like they could be the future of advanced damage-proof smartphone designs. After hearing about the tech in some super-expensive smartphones, we got to check out a pretty impressive demo at the Mobile World Congress, and later GT Crystal Systems was nice enough to give us a tour of its manufacturing facility. With sapphire screens starting to sound less outlandish and more likely to actually end up on an affordable commercial device within a span of a few years, we were getting pretty excited. ...

Sometimes you just have to schedule a podcast a few hours before a major news event, and as a result you've got to scramble to come up with some valid-sounding speculation about just how useful a Facebook Phone could really be. It's not like we haven't tossed this notion around before, but doing it on the air, off-the-cuff, imbues our lives with a certain energy, a certain je ne sais quoi, if you will. Or even if you won't. Whatever; we have a good time riffing. You'll listen and like it! Ahem. All that, plus some chat on just how big a copycat LG's Optimus G Pro is - and how well it does ...

If you followed our coverage from MWC in Barcelona, you might remember a demo by Jeff Nestel-Patt of GT Advanced Technologies, showcasing a smartphone display 2.5 times stronger than Gorilla Glass that was, for all intents and purposes, impervious to scratches. If you missed that video, maybe you caught our article from last week discussing sapphire's importance to the future of the mobile industry. If you missed both of those, then you're still in luck - because this piece right here trumps them both. You see, it turns out that the GT Crystal Systems facility at which much of the ...

Last month at MWC, we were treated to a rather compelling demonstration: a smartphone screen made of material so tough, it was practically un-scratchable. The company providing the demo was GT Advanced Technologies, and the screen was made of a material you've probably heard of, but in other contexts: sapphire. In an industry where hardware is fast becoming the differentiator of choice, "sapphire" is the new buzzword for legions of excitement-seeking tech fans. We're going to take a closer look at how synthetic sapphire comes into being, and how it finds its way into smartphones, next ...

We think it's pretty fair to say that MWC 2013 was one part IFA and one part CES: a few stark disappointments peppered among some really amazing stuff. We've seen technology this week ranging from the incredible to the absurd - from the third iteration of ASUS's wild Padfone concept to the improbable debut of a Kyocera Echo lookalike. The big guys have come out to play, too, but they're a little shy this time around: neither Samsung's Galaxy Note 8.0 nor Nokia's midrange Lumias blew the roof off the joint. Even a few has-beens came out to confuse us with their wares, some of which will be ...

That $10,000 Android we looked at a couple weeks back, the Vertu Ti, might not have been the most impressive phone in the specs department, but it did have one killer feature: a screen made of synthetic sapphire. Single crystals of aluminum oxide like this have a Mohs scale hardness of nine, meaning you're going to need something in the same league of hardness as other sapphires or diamonds in order to scratch them. At the MWC this year, we got to check out a demonstration of just what kind of damage sapphire screens can endure. In the battle of glass versus concrete, concrete will almost ...

Gravity is all around, pulling us down. Without it we'd fly off the earth into space -- cell reception isn't very good in space. In the meantime, we've got to guard against gravity and the dramatic influence it can have over our smartphones. I felt that influence first-hand last night when I dropped my Nexus 4 onto the floor. After getting home from work I parked in the garage. Loaded up my hands with all the papers and miscellanea from my day at the office, and tucked my smartphone under all of that. Bad idea. Some papers slipped and my Nexus 4 flopped onto the hard cement, face first. I ...

This time last year, Corning was tipping us off to the forthcoming launch of its second generation Gorilla Glass, and sure enough, the extra-tough glass made its debut just a few days later. This year's CES is once again just a matter of days away, and Corning is right back at it, readying us for the debut of Gorilla Glass 3. Considering how smartphone manufacturers continue to use glass not just for phone screens, but for its aesthetic qualities as well, we're just as much in need of durable glass treatments as ever. For as fortified as Corning's first two iterations of Gorilla Glass have ...

We've come a long way since the plastic touch screen of yesteryear. They were soft, resistive, scratched easily, and all but gave rise to the screen-protector industry. Today we've pretty much given up plastic screens for glass, and not just any glass: Corning Gorilla Glass! Gorilla Glass is super hard, super scratch resistant, and doesn't easily break (but when it does break it's quite impressive). How do they do that? The process itself is a tightly guarded secret (you can't have everyone making super-glass, right?), but it all comes down to "tempering". What is Tempering? Tempering is ...